Distributed Space-Time Message Relaying for Uncoded/Coded Wireless Cooperative Communications

During wireless communications, nodes can overhear other transmissions through the wireless medium, suggested by the broadcast nature of plane wave propagation, and may help to provide extra observations of the source signals to the destination. Modern research in wireless communications pays more attention to these extra observations which were formerly neglected within networks. Cooperative communication processes this abundant information existing at the surrounding nodes and retransmits towards the destination in various forms to create spatial and/or coding diversity, thereby to obtain higher throughput and reliability. The aim of this work is to design cooperative communication systems with distributed space-time block codes (DSTBC) in different relaying protocols and theoretically derive the BER performance for each scenario. The amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol is one of the most commonly used protocols at the relays. It has a low implementation complexity but with a drawback of amplifying the noise as well. We establish the derivation of the exact one-integral expression of the average BER performance of this system, folloby a novel approximation method based on the series expansion. An emerging technology, soft decode-and-forward (SDF), has been presented to combine the desired features of AF and DF: soft signal representation in AF and channel coding gain in DF. In the SDF protocol, after decoding, relays transmit the soft-information, which represents the reliability of symbols passed by the decoder, to the destination. Instead of keeping the source node idling when the relays transmit as in the traditional SDF system, we let the source transmit hard information and cooperate with the relays using DSTBC. By theoretically deriving the detection performance at the destination by either using or not using the DSTBC, we make comparisons among three SDF systems. Interesting results have been shown, together with Monte-Carlo simulations, to illustrate that our proposed one-relay and two-relay SDF & DSTBC systems outperform traditional soft relaying for most of the cases. Finally, these analytic results also provide a way to implement the optimal power allocation between the source and the relay or between relays, which is illustrated in the line model

Performance analysis for cooperative wireless communications

Cooperative relaying has been proposed as a promising solution to mitigate and combat the deleterious effects of fading by sending and receiving independent copies of the same signal at different nodes. It has attracted huge attention from both industry and academia. The purpose of this thesis is to provide an analytical performance evaluation of the cooperative wireless systems while taking some realistic conditions into consideration. To achieve this, first, performance analysis of amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying using pilot-aided maximum likelihood estimation is studied in this thesis. Both disintegrated channel estimation (DCE) and cascaded channel estimation (CCE) are considered. Based on this analysis, optimal energy allocation is proposed. Then, performance analysis for AF relaying corrupted by interferers are investigated. Both randomly distributed and fixed interferers are considered. For random interferers, both the number and the locations of the interferers are random while for fixed interferers, both the number and the locations are fixed. Next, multihop relaying and multiple scattering channels over α - μ fading are analyzed. Channels with interferences and without interferences are considered. Exact results in the form of one-dimensional integral are derived. Also, approximate results with simplified structure and closed-form expressions are provided. Finally, a new hard decision fusion rule that combines arbitrary numbers of bits for different samples taken at different nodes is proposed. The best thresholds for the fusion rules using 2 bits, 3 bits and 4 bits are obtained through simulation. The bit error rate (BER) for hard fusion rule with 1 bit is provided. Numerical results are presented to show the accuracy of our analysis and provide insights. First, they show that our optimal energy allocation methods outperform the conventional system without optimal energy allocation, which could be as large as several dB’s in some cases. Second, with the increase of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for AF relaying with interference, the outage probability decreases accordingly for both random and fixed interferers. However, with the change of interference-to-noise ratio (INR) but with the SINR fixed, the outage probability for random interferers change correspondingly while the outage probability for fixed interferers remains almost the same. Third, our newly derived approximate expressions are shown to have acceptable performances in approximating outage probability in wireless multihop relaying system and multiple scattering channel considering interferences and without interferences. Last, our new hard decision fusion rule is shown to achieve better performance with higher energy efficiency. Also they show that there is a tradeoff between performance and energy penalty in the hard decision fusion rule

Performance analysis of diversity techniques in wireless communication systems: Cooperative systems with CCI and MIMO-OFDM systems

This Dissertation analyzes the performance of ecient digital commu- nication systems, the performance analysis includes the bit error rate (BER) of dier- ent binary and M-ary modulation schemes, and the average channel capacity (ACC) under dierent adaptive transmission protocols, namely, the simultaneous power and rate adaptation protocol (OPRA), the optimal rate with xed power protocol (ORA), the channel inversion with xed rate protocol (CIFR), and the truncated channel in- version with xed transmit power protocol (CTIFR). In this dissertation, BER and ACC performance of interference-limited dual-hop decode-and-forward (DF) relay- ing cooperative systems with co-channel interference (CCI) at both the relay and destination nodes is analyzed in small-scale multipath Nakagami-m fading channels with arbitrary (integer as well as non-integer) values of m. This channel condition is assumed for both the desired signal as well as co-channel interfering signals. In addition, the practical case of unequal average fading powers between the two hops is assumed in the analysis. The analysis assumes an arbitrary number of indepen- dent and non-identically distributed (i.n.i.d.) interfering signals at both relay (R) and destination (D) nodes. Also, the work extended to the case when the receiver employs the maximum ratio combining (MRC) and the equal gain combining (EGC) schemes to exploit the diversity gain

Multiple UAVs as relays : multi-hop single link versus multiple dual-hop links

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have found many important applications in communications. They can serve as either aerial base stations or mobile relays to improve the quality of services. In this paper, we study the use of multiple UAVs in relaying. Considering two typical uses of multiple UAVs as relays that form either a single multi-hop link or multiple dual-hop links, we first optimize the placement the UAVs by maximizing the end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio for three useful channel models and two common relaying protocols. Based on the optimum placement, the two relaying setups are then compared in terms of outage and bit error rate. Numerical results show that the dual-hop multi-link option better than the multi-hop single link option when the air-to-ground path loss parameters depend on the UAV positions. Otherwise, the dual-hop option is only better when the source-to-destination distance small. Also, decode-and-forward UAVs provide better performances than amplify-and-forward UAVs. The investigation also reveals the effects of important system parameters on the optimum UAV positions and the relaying performances to provide useful design guidelines

Relay technology for performance improvement in WiMAX system

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Cooperative Wireless Systems

This Ph.D. dissertation reports on the work performed at the Wireless Communication Laboratory - University of Bologna and National Research Council - as well as, for six months, at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuit (IIS) in Nürnberg. The work of this thesis is in the area of wireless communications, especially with regards to cooperative communications aspects in narrow-band and ultra-wideband systems, cooperative links characterization, network geometry, power allocation techniques,and synchronization between nodes. The underpinning of this work is devoted to developing a general framework for design and analysis of wireless cooperative communication systems, which depends on propagation environment, transmission technique, diversity method, power allocation for various scenarios and relay positions. The optimal power allocation for minimizing the bit error probability at the destination is derived. In addition, a syncronization algorithm for master-slave communications is proposed with the aim of jointly compensate the clock drift and offset of wireless nodes composing the network

Secrecy Performance Analysis of Mixed Hyper-Gamma and Gamma-Gamma Cooperative Relaying System

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